Mantras that Rock!

As the chants and mantras that many of us have been using for years make their way into the public consciousness, there’s a wave of sound that is emerging filled with the beats and modern sounds that we are more accustomed to hearing on the top 40′s charts than in our yoga studios – and many of us are loving it – and a great by-product of this phenomenon is that people who are used to listening to the top 40′s charts are starting to pay attention to mantra.

Wah! rocks with sultry mantra grooves

Wah!’s latest release Love Holding Love, is so filled with rich electronic grooves, smooth loungy rhythms and sultry vocals, I find myself playing her music in settings I would never have considered using mantra music before.  I think of Wah! as the Maddona of sacred music.  With a sound somewhere between Sade and Morcheeba, this album is as likely to be played in a yoga studio as a coffee shop or pub. 

Some Sample Tracks from Love Holding Love (Click to Listen):

Ganesha ~ Maha Deva ~ Hanuman ~ Sacred Patterns ~ Heart Sutra Soulshine

Hip Hop Mantras by MC Yogi

Earlier this year, Parmita from White Swan Music, told me about this young hip-hop singer who was coming out with a CD Elephant Power of hip-hop music with mantras and hip-hop rhymes partnering with well known chanters including Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Bhagavan Das and many more.  I was a bit skeptical at first, but the more I played the CD, the more I liked it.  You might not be able to sit down and meditate wtih this CD, but you will find yourself having a blast listening to it!

Some Sample Tracks from Elephant Power (Click to Listen):

Elephant Power wih Bhagavan Das ~ Rock On Hanuman with Krishna Das ~ Krishna Love with Jai Uttal ~ Krishna Dub Remix featuring Sharon Gannon

Martyrs of Sound shares electronica and trance chants.

Martyrs of Sound just released their second album Uncoiled which brings an incredible modern sound to the Anand Sahib bani with compelling electronic beats supporting a recitation and overlaid by floating female vocals.  Their down-tempo sound  is as lush and heady as it is deep and filled with the sacred. 

Some Sample Tracks from Uncoiled (Click to Listen):

Ananda ~ Govinda

Dev Suroop's mantra rap

Last year, Dev Suroop released the CD Kundalini Beat in which she mixed hip-hop beats with favorite kundalini mantras.  I talked to her producer, Liv Singh, about the inspiration behind this album.   With the explosion of the hip-hop genre, Liv has been getting more and more clients asking him to produce hip-hop albums.  Being exposed to their music introduced him to teh excitement and raw energy that hip-hop contains.  Liv Singh said, “Hip Hop is a powerful medium for communicating ideas. I started to feel like it would be be a great way to present a Kundalini mantra album.”

Liv has worked with some well-known hip hop artists including Bizzy Bones, DMX’s producer and Bruce Walker from Dreamworks reocords.  Just before starting Kundalini Beat, he was finishing an album with PBR (Playboy Rich).  Jay Boo from PBR worked with Dev Suroop to teach her some of the basics of hip-hop, and then offered one of his beats to be used on the album.  PBR’s beat master, Rock, created the beats that are used on the Ong Namo track from this album.  One of the things about hip-hop is that it’s born of an improvised stream of consciousness lyrics style, so in creating the lyrics, they tried to keep with that style, writing lyrics while they were in the studio.

After they had finished the album, they sent a copy to us here at Spirit Voyage to review.  Hargobind felt like he’d really like to hear the same beats and rhythms behind just the mantras, so the album became a double album, with English lyrics mixed with mantra on one disc, and purely mantra on the other.

Click on track names to hear samples from Kundalini Beat:

 One Spirit Beyond ~ Liberation While Alive ~  Ong Namo / I Bow ~ Fearless ~ Aad Gurey Nameh

 

If you’re looking for mantras presented with some main-stream rock / pop sounds, try these:

Shiva Machine by Girish

The Lover and the Beloved by Donna de Lory

Mantra girls pop mantra

Yoga + Joyful Living : Yoga Rock Stars

Yoga Rock Stars

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Read this and many more articles in Yoga+ Joyful Living, an incredible magazine for the yoga commuity.

Yoga Rock Stars
A Special Report by Anna Dubrovsky

There’s a rave-like atmosphere in the ballroom of a Florida hotel and a group of musicians onstage, but this gathering of hundreds isn’t a party or performance. It’s a spiritual practice. The yoga conference participants singing and dancing late into the night are engaged in bhakti yoga, the yoga of joyful devotion to God.

Bhakti yoga isn’t a recent import. Many Westerners got their first taste in the 1960s, when shaven-headed Hare Krishna devotees took a bhakti practice called kirtan to the streets. Kirtan is the chanting of God’s names and attributes, often in call-and-response fashion. In 1969, Beatles guitarist George Harrison produced a recording of the Hare Krishna mantra, and bhakti debuted on Britain’s Top of the Pops. Around the same time, former Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert returned from India with a new name—Ram Dass—and the message that psychedelics were poor substitutes for divine love. He taught ancient Hindu chants to hippies.

Recent years have seen another surge of Western interest in bhakti yoga and particularly devotional chanting. Longtime “kirtan wallahs” such as Jai Uttal and Krishna Das (Americans both) have graduated from living rooms to concert venues that seat many hundreds, achieving the status of rock stars in the yoga community. These days, it’s rare to find a yoga conference without communal chanting on the program. The Omega Institute’s annual “Ecstatic Chant” weekend grew so popular that this year the retreat center scheduled two chant-a-thons. There are kirtan camps for those seeking in-depth study and kirtan ringtones for cell phones. The Canadian music company that manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan recently signed half a dozen chant artists to its label. “It’s a bull market,” quips Shyamdas, who has led kirtan for a quarter of a century.

Read More of this article at Yoga+ Joyful Living’s website

Anna Dubrovsky is a contributing editor of Yoga+. Last year, after returning from seven months of yoga study in Chennai, India, she settled in Pittsburgh, where she also teaches yoga.

Spirit Voyage Artist’s Featured in this Article:
Snatam Kaur

Click to See Snatam Kaur's Profile

Snatam Kaur’s day begins at a time when many musicians are heading to bed. At 4 a.m., she and her husband begin morning sadhana, two-and-a-half hours of Kundalini Yoga and chanting and prayer in the Sikh tradition. When she’s on tour, they’re joined by bandmates and crew. “As an artist, a lot of my inspiration comes at that time, a lot of the tunes and ideas for future albums,” says Snatam, who has churned out six solo albums since 2002. “It’s my well that I draw from.” Snatam’s parents turned to Sikhism shortly after she was born. She learned kirtan from her mother and musical improvisation from her father, a former manager for the Grateful Dead. Her kirtans include Gurmukhi chants drawn from Sikh scriptures and English aphorisms composed by her spiritual teacher, Yogi Bhajan, who brought Kundalini Yoga to the West in the 1960s. Between chants, she teaches yoga and meditation. “I look at each concert as a full experience of healing. The words that we share are considered to be a technology of transformation—almost like opening up a medicine cabinet.”

Home Base: Espanola, New Mexico
Website: www.snatamkaur.com
Can’t Miss: Snatam will be among the musicians performing from the world’s most mystical sites as part of Project-Peace on Earth, a globally telecast event scheduled for September 2009. www.project-peaceonearth.org
Coming Soon: She will release a children’s album that includes “Feeling Good,” a song Snatam wrote at 15 and rediscovered while flipping through old journals. An accompanying DVD will feature an interactive yoga class for children.
Click Here for Snatam Kaur’s Music

Dave Stringer

Click to see Dave Stringer Profile

Dave Stringer didn’t go to India in 1990 to find a guru. He went because he was broke and couldn’t refuse a job shooting films for the first Siddha Yoga ashram. “All the images of people sitting in meditation ‘blissed out’ were actually a turnoff
for me rather than an enticement,” he says. At the ashram in Ganeshpuri, the skeptic became an enthusiast in short order. “The experience of chanting, which was at first total nonsense to me, was strangely compelling, not only musically but in terms of how I felt—completely ecstatic,” says Stringer, a trained jazz musician. About a decade after returning to Los Angeles, he traded his career in film editing for one in kirtan. “I don’t ask people who come to my kirtans to believe in it. I ask them to suspend their disbelief for a long enough time to give it a go and see what happens.”

Home Base: Los Angeles, California
Website: www.davestringer.com
Can’t Miss: Stringer will lead chanting at the Big Island Retreat with Ram Dass and friends in Pahoa, Hawaii, Nov. 5–10, 2008. www.ramdass.org
Coming Soon: His fifth album is scheduled for release in September. Stringer’s spring 2009 tour will be recorded for a live album to be released the following fall.
Click Here for Dave Stringer’s Music

Also featured in this article:
Krishna Das: Bhakti With a Dash of Blues
Deva Premal & Miten: At Home in the World
Wah!: “If It’s Playful, I’m There.”
Jai Uttal: In the Footsteps of the Minstrels
Seán Johnson
Wade Imre Morissette
David Newman aka Durga Das
Shyamdas
Benjy and Heather Wertheimer, aka Shantala